New York has come down in crowds to Long Branch, and all the hotels have emptied themselves on to the race-course. Three miles of road are covered with moving carriages, wagons and stages—one cloud of yellow dust rolls along the road without a break. Every carriage is gay with brightly dressed ladies. Thousands go up or down on the railroad, whose engine stops and pours out clouds of black smoke close by the race track. From the cars a stream of people now on to the course, packing themselves into the benches of the Grand Stand, or scattering on the grass around it.
When we got into the enclosure fifteen thousand people were waiting, some in the hot sun, others in the hot shade, all choked with dust and sweltering with heat.
We were late. There was but one thing that we wanted to see: the race between Longfellow and Harry Bassett—two of the swiftest horses in the country.
If horses could gamble I should call these two beautiful creatures black-legs, and the gayest of gamboliers; but as they can't do it themselves men and women do it for them.
This time twenty-five thousand dollars was to go to the swiftest horse—twenty-five thousand dollars—enough to build a meeting-house. Doesn't it make you tremble in your shoes; but that isn't all. Everybody was betting with everybody else, just for the fun of betting.
I saw a little shaver there, ten years old, who boasted that he had won three pair of gloves from a little girl of eight.
The cream of that fifteen thousand skimmed itself off and consolidated in a handsome square building that they call the Club House. We went there, of course, and soon got seats among a crowd of upper-tenists on the roof, which took in a view of the whole race-ground.
One or two horses, with funny little fellows on their backs, were moving up and down before the Grand Stand, but no one seemed to care about them. Harry Bassett and Longfellow were all they wanted in the way of fast horses.
Sisters, don't fancy now that Longfellow is of a poetic, or even literary, turn of mind. Nor do I want you to think that his owner named him after our great New England poet because he was fired with admiration of his genius. Nothing of the kind. I don't suppose that "old Kentucky gentleman" ever read a line of Longfellow's poetry in his life—may be, though I hate to think so, he never heard of him—at any rate this great, long, swift, beautiful animal was named after himself, and nobody else. His body is long and slender, very long, and that is why the colt got his name. I wish it had been the other way, but it wasn't, and truth is truth. In fact, I'm afraid literature isn't appreciated on the race-course. It takes all the romance out of one to know that this grand young horse was named after his own body, and not after our great New Englander.
Never mind about the name now, Harry Bassett is coming down the road, and slackens his speed in front of the Grand Stand. A beautiful, beautiful animal, with limbs like a deer, and a coat smooth as satin, colored like a plump ripe chestnut. Fifteen thousand people clap their hands, stamp their feet, shout, cheer, and flutter out their handkerchiefs as the horse goes by.